Rethinking Islam & the West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises

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Our interview with SherAli Tareen as part of our new podcast series “Rethinking Islam Today” is available now on Anchor and all podcast platforms: https://anchor.fm/cis-cambridge The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking, as long as it can go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies by engaging with non-Eurocentric scholarship and, additionally, by carrying the critical angles to the ways it engages with those non-Eurocentric scholarships. From Konkan to Coromandel – Deepthi Murali on “ Painted Chests and Sculpted Beds: Tracing Artistic Connections Between the Malabar Coast and the Broader Indian Ocean World ‘‘ Bio: Alice Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on transformations of the relationship between governing authorities and governed constituencies in revolutions and liberation movements in the Middle East and North Africa. She is author of Sovereignty in Exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs (Pennsylvania, 2016). Karen Ruffle is Associate Professor of South Asian Islam in the Departments of Historical Studies and Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on devotional texts, ritual practice, and Shiʿi material practices in South Asia. Her books include Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia (2021) and Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (2011). Her current projects include a monograph titled, Building the City of Haider: Kingship, Urban Space, and Shiʿi Ritual in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad and a large-scale study of South Asian Shiʿi material culture and sensorial practices titled, Barakah Bodies: Shiʿi Materiality, the Sensorium, and Ritual in India and Pakistan.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Professor of Politics, Provost and Acting President of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. El-Affendi has served as the Head of the Politics and IR Program at the Institute (2015-2017), and was founder and Coordinator of the Democracy and Islam Program at the University of Westminster (since 1998). He is also head of Promotion Committee and the Institute. El-Affendi also served as a diplomat in the Sudanese Foreign Ministry (1990-1997), London-based journalist, including editor or managing editor of several publications (1982-1990). All nations are now judged according to their scientific progress, technological development and economic growth. And yet, humanity is now experiencing multiple crises that are threatening our very existence. Population explosion, financial, social and political instability, the alarming growth of mental illness, the threat of nuclear annihilation and climate change all loom over humanity like a dark cloud. Simultaneously, the world is witnessing a dangerous escalation in the polarisation between Islam and the West. Islam in the Greek world is an abiding theme in Elizabeth Key Fowden’s research, which draws on architectural, visual and textual sources to analyse cultural, religious and intellectual exchange. Spanning from late antique Syria to Ottoman Greece to the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Aegean to contemporary Arab art, her publications include The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (1999), Studies on Hellenism, Christianity and the Umayyads (with Garth Fowden, 2004), ‘The lamp and the wine flask: Early Muslim interest in Christian monasticism’ (2007), ‘Jerusalem and the work of discontinuity’ (2019), ‘The Parthenon Mosque, King Solomon and the Greek Sages’ (2019) and ‘The circle in the work of Kamal Boullata’ (2021). She is currently completing a monograph, The Parthenon Mosque.

Changing our perspective from one rooted in the principle of progress to one informed by the criterion of Mizan – a concept that encompasses balance, scale, justice, and harmony – can bring about a deeper understanding of the multiple crises that humanity faces. CIS-DHF Malabar series– Emma Flatt on ‘ The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis‘ But what Ahmed Keeler remarkably says in this book is that perhaps the fundamental understanding that progression is the factor of success is wrong. He mentions instead that we should be living according to the principle of Balance, known in Arabic approximately as 'Mizaan'. According to Keeler, the crisis of the Islamic world and indeed of all humanity over the past 200 years is a product of the mistakes and wrongdoings of the modern Western world, not the Muslims; it is a result of the unlimited expansion of modern culture which has shattered all the traditional worlds from China and India to Christian Europe and indigenous America. He argues that the Islamic and other traditional civilisations have not fallen behind, but rather that the modern West has crossed a line that had never been crossed before. It has broken a balance taken by traditional cultures to hold the secret of natural stability and social harmony, and replaced it with the idea of unlimited “progress”. The progress of the modern world has come at the expense of immense human suffering and the constant threat of social and natural calamities. It has opened a pandora’s box, out of which emerged weapons of mass destruction, pollution, deforestation, increasing intensity of natural disasters, global warming, superbugs, the collapse of the family, the disappearance of childhood, an epidemic of addictions of all kinds, loneliness, and mental illnesses, terrorism, financial crises and more. The feeling that this path is taking us to a disaster grows every day. A path on which we race, ever faster. On a visit to the celebrated Hoysaḷa temples at Belur and Halebid, it is near impossible to escape stories of twelfth-century queen Shantaladevi. Aware that inscriptions record her proficiency in dance, music, and dramaturgy, and familiar with the twentieth century novels that fictionalize her life as a romantic tragedy, tour guides identify the female forms that adorn the outside of the Channakeshava temple as her portraits. Very few people learn, however, that she commissioned the Kappe Channigaraya Temple that sits just to its left in a powerful political act. What we can learn about Shantaladevi by situating her in the systems and institutions of her own time instead of examining her in isolation? Was she truly different from other elite women of her time, and if so, was she exceptional for the reasons her mythos has long espoused?

Award-winning Egyptian author and filmmaker Nadia Kamel’s heritage is a complex blend of religions and cultures. Her mother is a half-Jewish, half-Italian Christian who converted to Islam when she married Nadia’s half-Turkish, half-Ukrainian father. But her book, Al-Mawloudah, is only partially about the life of one woman of Egypt; it is also the documentation of an oral history of Egypt’s foreigners, Jews and Communists; of the inhabitants of Cairo, the consecutive rules of Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat and of course of the latter’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem and the subsequent peace process. Above all, it is a story told from the heart with a great deal of passion. Saussan is Senior Language Teacher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University. She has recently completed her PhD from Leeds University. Saussan is also the founder of Kalamna C.I.C, a social venture providing children’s Arabic classes in Cambridge: www.kalamna.org.I'll start by saying that the Author ascribes himself to Sufism, while this is not something I myself ascribe to, it isn't difficult to see its influence on this book. Regardless, this isn't something that affects the message of the book or the overall method of proposing his argument. CIS Public Talks – Prof. Michael Cooperson on “ They cannot be imitated in English”: translating the Arabic Impostures of al-Hariri (d. 1122)’‘ CIS Public Talks – Magnus Marsden on ‘ ‘Inter-Asia’ through Inland Eyes: Afghan Trading Networks across Land and Sea.‘